


Sorority

by St_Salieri



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Crossover, Gen, Vampire Slayer(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-16
Updated: 2011-01-16
Packaged: 2017-11-25 09:58:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/637687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/St_Salieri/pseuds/St_Salieri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jo Harvelle started to wonder if she was turning into a monster.  Crossover with BtVS.  Takes place before and during the events of the SPN S5 episode <i>Abandon All Hope.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Sorority

**Author's Note:**

> Note: the character death is nothing that wasn't already shown onscreen.

It all began one day in mid-September when Jo was brushing her teeth.

She leaned over to spit and was hit with a wave of dizziness that had her clutching the sink and gasping. The blood in her veins burned as it rushed to her head, and every shaking breath brought in too much oxygen.

"Help," she croaked, but she knew she was alone in the house, and her voice sounded too loud in her ears. She could feel the tips of her fingers and toes tingling, and a sudden rush of strength came over her as if she'd been doused in liquid fire.

And then, as soon as it had appeared, the dizziness vanished.

It took a minute to bring her breathing under control, and when she raised her head she half expected to see a stranger staring back at her from the mirror. But she saw only herself, face pale and pupils wide and staring. She brought a shaking hand to the mirror and traced her own reflection, pressing hard on the smooth glass to center herself.

The crack of the mirror sounded like a shotgun in the empty room. She pulled her fingers away from the spiderweb that spread across the glass and stared in shock at the blood that coated the tips of her fingers.

**********

It only took her a few hours to wonder if she'd been possessed by a demon that for some reason was allowing her to keep awareness of herself. She started drinking holy water that afternoon, sprinkling salt on her own skin and waiting for the resulting pain.

The fact that she didn't burn was of minimal comfort.

She broke the faucet in her bathroom and bent two forks as if they were made of tin foil. She threw her knives and shot her practice targets with a precision that frightened her. She scaled the tree in the field across the way with a balance and ease she'd never had before.

She started calling it her Power, as if she was some kind of a superhero. Pretending she was one of the X-Men was better than the alternative, because she knew deep down in her secret heart of hearts that she had become something very wrong.

She'd heard dark talk from other hunters about young people who possessed supernatural abilities of some kind. It was demonic, they said. They were cursed, and sooner or later they all ended up dead.

 _I'm not a monster,_ she would whisper fiercely to herself as she fell asleep each night. As long as she could say it and mean it, it would be true.

**********

The dreams began two weeks later.

At first she dreamed about fights she'd had, hunts she'd participated in. She would wake panting, her heart racing and muscles aching as if she'd been clenching them for hours.

Those were the good nights.

Some nights she would dream about people she didn't recognize and things she couldn't possibly know about. Sometimes it was the past, sometimes it was some future she didn't want to know. She saw her father die, in vivid, blood-drenched detail. She saw her mother with a gun in her hand and a snarl on her face, standing in an empty street and facing down an unknown enemy. She felt the fetid breath of a hellhound against her own face and smelled her own blood.

During the day she would make her excuses and plead a need for fresh air. Outside, she would run and run, way past the point at which her lungs would normally be burning. She ran fluidly, with a grace she'd never had before, jumping puddles and hurdling fences as if she had wings on her feet instead of a pair of too-small boots.

One day a stray dog bounded across her path, and without even thinking she fell forward into a fluid roll and came right back up to her feet, running and laughing at the empty sky above her. Because it _couldn't_ be entirely bad, this strange Power she had, not if it made her feel so strong and fast and free. Right?

And if she ran far and hard enough, the demon inside her would quiet enough that she would be able to sleep through the night.

**********

She sometimes overheard them when they didn't think she was listening, those hard-bitten, road-weary hunters who would stop by every now and then to exchange news with her mother. They'd give Jo the expected leer and dismiss her after she'd brought them a beer, but at least no one tried to pat her on the ass anymore. The last guy who'd done that had pulled back a hand with two broken fingers, and apparently the news had spread.

"You heard about young Winchester?" one of them asked one day in October, giving her mother a meaningful glance. Her mother gave a noncommittal grunt, and Jo leaned further back into the shadows to avoid their attention while she listened and listened.

"They say he's no better than a demon now." Sometimes it was said in anger and disgust, sometimes with a lurid glee. This time it was the disgust. "Has unnatural powers. Started the apocalypse and everything. And his brother's no better. Any hunter worth his goddamned salt would have put that abomination in the ground a year ago, brother or no. No telling what their poor daddy would think about them. But then again, there was always something off about that family."

"That's more than I can speak to," her mother answered carefully. She never needed to raise her voice. Jo knew from experience that the softer she spoke, the more scary she was. "But I'd be careful who you listen to. Those boys have been doing some damn fine work, and they're up against more than the usual shapeshifter or wendigo these days."

"Maybe," the other replied darkly. "But I still say you can't trust a family that harbors a freak like that."

The empty bottle snapped in Jo's hand, just disintegrated into bits of glass that fell through her clenched fingers and hit the floor with a tinkle. She could barely see her mother's concerned look through the heat that rose in her face and caused her eyes to water. The Power rushed through her veins, tightening her muscles and sharpening her hearing to an almost painful level. She found herself counting the heartbeats of everyone in the room.

"Butterfingers, sweetheart?" one of the hunters said with a smirk, addressing her chest.

Jo turned and fled.

**********

Afraid that the daily dose of holy water and salt wasn't enough, she started researching protection charms and spells. She would spend hours locked in her room, poring over musty books borrowed or stolen from any source she could find. She chanted in Latin, Aramaic and Enochian until her voice was hoarse, carving secret symbols into the flesh of her stomach and thighs with a silver knife.

At first it was protection for herself, spells of hiding and obfuscation - _don't let them find me out_. After a few weeks, she turned to more powerful binding spells - _please don't let me hurt anyone_.

She knew she was scaring her mother.

"Meditation," Jo explained brusquely one day in early November when her mother found her sitting on the living room floor with folded legs. How to explain that she had to sit still in silence - _had_ to - because she was afraid of slipping down into the darkness if she used her Powers? She ached to explain, to beg for help, to be comforted, but she didn't dare. If she was becoming something evil, she couldn't put her mother in a spot where she'd be forced to choose between her daughter and doing the right thing. She couldn't bear it if those hunters started whispering about her family the way they spoke of the Winchesters.

"Honey," her mother said, then stopped and shook her head. Survival of Jo's volatile teen years had apparently given her experience in figuring out when it was useless to push her daughter. "You can talk to me about anything," she finished helplessly.

_I wish I could, Mom, but I can't. This is for your own good. I'm sorry._

**********

In November, in Carthage, Missouri, Jo watched as Dean Winchester was brought to the ground by a pack of hellhounds.

Without conscious decision, she raised her shotgun and fired round after round of salt-filled shells into the invisible creatures. The fact that she couldn't see them was immaterial. She knew exactly where they were, their presence singing along her skin with a quicksilver shiver, and she gave in to the Power coursing through her and aimed her weapon inerrantly. Quickly she shot, her anger making her sharper and quicker, and she listened in satisfaction to the whimpering howls as blood bloomed on the empty air wherever she fired.

The claws that ripped through her side burned like holy fire, and by the time she realized that Dean was carrying her they were halfway through the door of an abandoned hardware store. He jostled her roughly as he set her down, but she barely noticed above the pain in her side and the pain in her heart. Because she _knew it_ , she knew it all along, and if this wasn't proof that she was evil then nothing else would do.

 _Don't bother,_ she wanted to tell her mother as she fussed with bandages. _It's my fault. I used my Powers, and I'm being punished._

She drifted in and out, trying to steady her breathing as her heart pumped blood out of the gashes in her stomach. She held the compress against her side obediently, trying not to notice the way her mother's lips trembled. And she knew with perfect certainty that this was it, that she was going to die here today. The thought was almost a relief. If she could do something useful with her death, then maybe her soul wasn't irrevocably lost.

Tears burned against her cheek, and she wasn't sure whose they were. She drifted again, and then Dean was kissing her goodbye with such sorrow in his face. She closed her eyes and held tight to the trigger in her hand, and when she opened them again the boys were gone and her mother was holding her tightly.

"Jo."

She cuddled closer to her mother, feeling tired in her bones and blood. She wanted to apologize. She wanted to tell her mom that it wasn't her fault. But mostly, she wanted to sleep.

"Jo Harvelle?"

The voice was soft and warm, and it didn't belong to her mother. Jo opened her eyes to see a young woman her own age standing in front of her She was dressed in a pair of jeans and boots like a hunter, and her dark blond hair was tied back at the base of her neck. She held a sword in her hand like an avenging angel, and her eyes were ancient and deadly. She knelt before Jo and laid the sword on the ground - except that it wasn't a sword at all, it was an axe that gleamed like fire, with a shaft that narrowed down to a sharp point.

"I'm so sorry," the girl said, looking at Jo with those old old eyes. "You're a bit older than we were expecting, and it took us a long time to find you. For some reason, you were hidden from us. It took the coven weeks to locate you."

 _Reaper,_ thought Jo, wondering vaguely at her lack of surprise. She eyed the girl in front of her, at the way the glass on the floor didn't cut through her jeans and the blood on the floor left no stains on her knees.

"I'm not really here," the girl said. "But you probably knew that. They told me I'd probably come too late, but I had to see you. I'm sorry you had to go through all this on your own."

The girl reached out and took Jo's hand, and even though Jo _knew_ that she wasn't really there, she could feel the pressure and power from the hand that held her. The strength was familiar, and it made her gasp in recognition. For the first time, it didn't feel evil.

 _Who are you?_ she thought, but when she opened her mouth to ask it came out, "Who am I?"

"You're Chosen," the girl said with a soft smile. "You're Chosen to be one of those who stand against the forces of darkness. There used to be just one of us, but now there are many."

Jo raised her eyes, and the walls of the hardware store seemed to vanish into the distance. Behind the blond girl stood shadowy figures of young women - hundreds upon hundreds, all races, all colors, all sizes, some in familiar jeans and boots, and others in pinafores and bonnets and period clothing she barely recognized. Some held knives and swords, others hefted pointed stakes of wood, and their eyes shone with a fierce joy.

"They're beautiful," Jo said, her eyes moving from one face to another. Her lips were starting to feel numb, and just talking was an effort. "Then...I'm not a demon?"

The girl in front of her looked like she was going to cry. "No, you're not a demon," she said softly. Her eyes flicked upward out of Jo's field of view, as if someone out of sight was talking to her.

"I have to be quick," the girl said in a low voice, pulling Jo's attention back to her. "I can't come across to help you - there isn't enough magic for that. But we can pull you across to us, if you'd like. All the strength and speed you've been experiencing? Well, healing is part of the package. If you want, you can come with me."

Jo stared at the girl's outstretched hand for a moment, then shook her head. "I can't," she slurred. "My mom...."

The girl closed her eyes sadly. "I know," she said. "And I'm so sorry." She raised her hand and ghosted it across Jo's cheek. "I wish I'd had a chance to know you better. But I want you to know that you're our sister, and we won't forget you."

Jo closed her eyes as a pair of lips was pressed to her forehead.

"That's my good girl," her mother said in a rough voice Jo had never heard her use before, her words catching on a sob.

 _It's okay,_ she wanted to say. Her heart felt so light she almost couldn't bear it. _Mommy, it's okay. I'm not a monster after all._ But she couldn't move her lips or open her eyes. The Power burned warm inside her, ebbing now, and she could still see the ranks of girls standing behind her closed eyelids. They smiled at her, welcoming her, pulling her forward with warm hands and loving eyes.

 _Be at peace,_ they said, and then all Jo saw was light.

 


End file.
